YourNewsWire

YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com[1]) is a Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto (“News. Truth. Unfiltered”).[1]

Someone is wrong on
The Internet
Log in:
v - t - e
Some dare call it
Conspiracy
What THEY don't want
you to know!
Sheeple wakers
v - t - e

According to Josh Boswell of The Sunday Times, Sean Adl-Tabatabai (a former television producer) is the owner and ‘Editor-in-chief’.[2] However, YourNewsWire also claims that it is owned by holding company called The People’s Voice (Incorporated), which is the name of their Facebook account.[3]

Carol Adl (the mother of Sean Adl-Tabatabai according to UK-based marketing magazine The Drum),[4] Edmundo Burr and Baxter Dmitry (who once stole the photo of a Latvian computer programmer[5]) are the website’s ‘staff writers’.[3]

History

According to the Internet Archive (since YourNewsWire spoke nothing much about their history), Sean Adl-Tabatabai created YourNewsWire around the summer of 2014.[6] According to Boswell, Sean Adl-Tabatabai was a former BBC and MTV television producer in the United Kingdom, but afterwards he helped operate the website of conspiracy theorist David Icke … who also worked for the BBC.[5]

Political stance

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) classifies YourNewsWire as ‘Conspiracy/Pseudoscience’, arguing that it “mixes” conspiracy theories with legitimate news,[7] presumably to confuse readers into believing in the conspiracy theories.

YourNewsWire appears to be pro-Russian: According to Boswell, the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force criticised YourNewsWire for using fake news to favour Russian policy. However, Joel Harding (a Kremlin propaganda expert) believed that Russians were using YourNewsWire as a mule or proxy to spread disinformation.[5]

(In)accuracy record

On 24 May 2017, Snopes warned that YourNewsWire had a “long record of promoting false information”, after debunking a false claim (by YourNewsWire) that a suicide bombing attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, United Kingdom, was a hoax or an inside job.[8] YourNewsWire was one of the websites that promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

The Manchester attacks claim was the eighth time that Snopes debunked YourNewsWire, having previously chided them for falsely claiming that Adolf Hitler faked his suicide and escaped to Argentina, and that 25 Million Fraudulent Votes Were Cast for Hillary Clinton.[9][10]

Boswell of The Sunday Times also cited YourNewsWire for falsely claiming that Queen Elizabeth II threatened to abdicate if the United Kingdom voted to remain in the European Union.[2] It appears that the ‘abdication’ article was created to give YourNewsWire an excuse to claim that they were right when the UK did vote to leave the EU: however, Queen Elizabeth II would certainly do nothing regardless of the outcome.

Self-censorship

YourNewsWire is unsurprisingly not ‘unfiltered’, as the website’s slogan claims: despite Sean and Sinclair Adl-Tabatabai performing one of the first ever same sex marriages in the United Kingdom in 2014,[11] YourNewsWire has to date not covered the Chechen crackdown on gay men:[12] the BBC and Reuters have already covered it.[13][14]

Examples of (clickbait) headlines
Sampled on 25 May 2017[3]
  • “Putin: New World Order Are In Final Stages Of Their European Masterplan”
  • “Amnesty International: US Gave ISIS $1 Billion Worth Of Arms In 2016”
  • “Catholic Church Tells Bishops They Don’t Have To Report Pedophilia”
  • “US Navy SEALs Kill Five Civilians In Yemen Raid: Reprieve”
  • “Islamic State Clash With Philippine Army, Take Control Of Marawi”
  • “Katy PerryFile:Wikipedia's W.svg: ‘Human Flesh Is The Best Meat; Cannibalism Got A Bad Rap’”
  • "Texas Church Shooter Was Antifa Member Who Vowed To Start Civil War"[15]

Response

In addition to widespread criticism of YourNewsWire for publishing fake stories, Google banned the site from its advertising network, in response to The Sunday Times’ investigation.[4]

Despite the overwhelming evidence against YourNewsWire, Sean Adl-Tabatabai stubbornly insists that his website is “legitimate”, even going as far as to accuse The Sunday Times of “publishing fake news against him”.[4]

gollark: It was very elegant. I combinated™ it in a few lines of code.
gollark: It went nicely and I had a cool parser and all until it turned out that we were accidentally pushing to the wrong end of a list or something in a stupidly hard to debug way.
gollark: Fun times, that was. We were using JS to implement that weird stacky language.
gollark: Oh, like our interpreter race.
gollark: Probably just lack of experience and/or poor teaching, but still.

References
  1. "YourNewsWire". YourNewsWire. 26 May 2017. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
  2. Josh Boswell (January 29, 2017). "Mother churns out stories for master of fake news". News UK. "The man behind one of America's biggest 'fake news' websites is a former BBC worker from London whose mother writes many of his stories. Sean Adl-Tabatabai, 35, runs YourNewsWire, the source of scores of dubious news stories, including claims that the Queen had threatened to abdicate if the UK voted against Brexit."
  3. "Contact". YourNewsWire. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  4. Connelly, Tony (29 February 2017). "Man behind one of the biggest sites accused of 'fake news' is former BBC worker". The Drum. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
  5. Harding, Joel (29 January 2017). "Mother churns out stories for master of fake news". Joel Harding (To Inform is to Influence). Retrieved 26 May 2017.
  6. "YourNewsWire". YourNewsWire. 26 May 2017. Retrieved 26 May 2017. out of the snapshots before 10 August 2014, the first one does not suggest any relation with Sean Adl-Tabatabai, the next two were redirects to an unrelated site, and the last one was a domain parking page.
  7. Van Zandt, Dave. "Your News Wire". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  8. Palma, Bethania (24 May 2017). "Was the Manchester Terror Attack a 'False Flag'?". Snopes. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  9. "Archives tagged ‘YourNewsWire’". Snopes. Retrieved 25 May 2017.
  10. "Archives tagged ‘Your News Wire’". Snopes. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
  11. Godwin, Richard (16 February 2017). "Sean Adl-Tabatabai on being in the eye of the 'fake news' storm". London: Evening Standard. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
  12. "You searched for chechnya camps". YourNewsWire. Retrieved 26 May 2017. Spoiler: we found nothing.
  13. Peter, Laurence (11 April 2017). "Chechen police 'kidnap and torture gay men' - LGBT activists". BBC News. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
  14. Pujol-Mazzini, Anna (12 April 2017). "Londoners protest against 'unprecedented' anti-LGBT violence in Chechnya". Reuters UK. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
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